News Consumption Patterns of Political Elites in the U.S.

• In Event: Elites in the News

Abstract

Relatively little is known about where do American elected officials get their news, yet it is of utmost importance to understand what sources do their turn to for information, as it might affect their opinions, attitudes, and behavior. Scholars realize the importance of studying elected officials, and there has recently been a movement to better understand behavior of politicians (Sheffer et al 2017, 2018a, 2018b). In this paper, we use a dataset of municipal, county, and state level elected officials across the entire United States to investigate three aspects of their information environment, using a survey experiment. First, do they rely on primarily partisan sources for news, or are their media diets ideologically balanced? Second, how much credibility do politicians assign to online news sources, including sites that have demonstrated track record in sharing misinformation? Lastly, do policymakers engage in partisan motivated reasoning when they do assign source credibility to news media outlets?

We believe that this study will help us understand the nature of news media consumption among American policymakers and will prove an important first step in understanding where elected officials look for information and how is that process different from the broader American electorate.

Authors

• Dominik Andrzej Stecula, University of Pennsylvania

• Kathleen Hall Jamieson, University of Pennsylvania